Muslim Pilgrimage in the Modern World

Babak Rahimi, Peyman Eshaghi, Babak Rahimi, Peyman Eshaghi

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781469651477
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Pilgrimage is one of the most significant ritual duties for Muslims, entailing the visitation and veneration of sites associated with the Prophet Muhammad or saintly figures. As demonstrated in this multidisciplinary volume, the lived religion of pilgrimage, defined by embodied devotional practices, is changing in an age characterized by commerce, technology, and new sociocultural and political frameworks. Traveling to and far beyond the Hajj, the most well-known Muslim pilgrimage, the volume's contributors reveal and analyze emerging contemporary Islamic pilgrimage practices around the world, in minority- and majority-Muslim countries as well as in urban and rural settings. What was once a tiny religious attraction in a remote village, for example, may begin to draw increasing numbers of pilgrims to shrines and tombs as the result of new means of travel, thus triggering significant changes in the traditional rituals, and livelihoods, of the local people. Organized around three key themes—history and politics; embodiment, memory, and material religion; and communications—the book reveals how rituals, practices, and institutions are experienced in the context of an inexorable global capitalism. The volume contributors are Sophia Rose Arjana, Rose Aslan, Robert R. Bianchi, Omar Kasmani, Azim Malikov, Lewis Mayo, Julian Millie, Reza Masoudi Nejad, Paulo G. Pinto, Babak Rahimi, Emilio Spadola, Edith Szanto, and Brannon Wheeler.

PART I Rethinking Muslim Pilgrimage

History, Politics, and Transnationalism

CHAPTER ONE

Sacrifice and Pilgrimage

Body Politics and the Origins of Muslim Pilgrimage

BRANNON WHEELER

Sometime during the fifth century B.C.E., a gift of eight silver vessels was made to a shrine located at what is now known as Tell al-Maskhuta, some twelve miles west of the modern Egyptian town of Ismailiyah.1 Today the vessels are in the Brooklyn Museum. Along with the vessels were found a number of agate stones, which may have decorated a wooden box in which the gift was transported to the shrine. Holes in the stones suggest that they may have been used as amulets prior to their gold mounting. Three of the silver vessels are inscribed with Aramaic texts, the shortest of which simply gives the recipient of the donation as “han-Ilat,” or “the goddess,” presumably the deity of the shrine.

Inscriptions from other locations in Syria and the Arabian Peninsula refer to “Allat” and “Lat,” and the Qurʾan mentions “al-Lat” as the name of a deity worshipped by pre-Islamic Arabs.2 Herodotus, who traveled throughout Egypt in the fifth century B.C.E., writes that the Arabs worshipped a goddess named “Alilat,” whom they identified with the Greek goddess Aphrodite Urania but perhaps also with Athena.

The longest inscription gives the name of the person donating the silver vessel and identifies the goddess Ilat as its recipient: “That which Qainu son of Geshem, king of Kedar, offered to Ilat.”

As a tribal grouping from the northern Arabian Peninsula, Kedar is known from a number of contexts in the ancient world, including the Bible. Jeremiah 2:10, from the late seventh century B.C.E., refers to the Kedar as living at the eastern edges of the world. The oracle of Jeremiah 49:28–33, which may refer to the campaign of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar against the Arabs in 599 B.C.E., mentions Kedar. Ezekiel 27:21 mentions the “princes of Kedar” as delivering sheep to the Phoenicians. Arabic sources from the early Islamic period state that the Kedar—named after one of the twelve sons of Ishmael the son of Abraham—is the tribe from which the Prophet Muhammad descends.

From the inscriptions, it is evident that the vessels were deposited at the shrine as a votive offering, brought perhaps by a group making pilgrimage to the site for the purpose of making the donation. The evidence for such votive offerings is widespread in the Mediterranean and Middle East and is not uncommon among the Arabs of Syria and the Arabian Peninsula. Other ancient shrines in the area provide documentary and archaeological evidence attesting to the common practice of pilgrimage among Arabs in pre-Islamic times.3

Making pilgrimage for the purpose of giving gifts or making a sacrifice to deities lives on in the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca and to other sites linked with the Prophet Muhammad and the early history of Islam. Arabic literary sources link Islamic practices with pre-Islamic pilgrimages throughout the Arabian Peninsula and among Arabs outside Arabia.

Islam is one of the only religions that continues the regular practice of animal sacrifice. Unlike Judaism and Christianity, in which the practice has been textualized or sublimated, making sacrifice a vestige of a more primitive stage in the development of religion, Islam makes sacrifice central to the identity of individual Muslims and to the constitution of the Muslim community as a whole. It does this through the annual ritual performance of the pilgrimage to Mecca, when the Muslim world comes together to worship at what is regarded as the earth’s first temple, following in the footsteps of the earliest biblical prophets, Adam and Abraham. The centrality of the temple and the animal sacrifice that accompanies the pilgrimage to this temple roots the contemporary practice of Muslims not only in the classical origins of Abrahamic religion but in the model of religion that stands at the foundations of human civilization in the Middle East.

The following pages examine the origins and early development of Muslim pilgrimage. Archaeological and other documentary evidence, taken alongside Arabic literary sources, show how a number of ancient concepts and practices were incorporated into and aligned to coincide with the life of the Prophet Muhammad. Pre-Islamic notions linked with fertility and death were used to portray the Prophet Muhammad as initiating a new world order set into the historical framework of cosmogony and eschatology.

Origins of Pilgrimage to Mecca

The ninth-century Iraqi historian Muhammad b. Jarir al-Tabari (d. 923) relates an account regarding the Kaʿba in Mecca during pre-Islamic times.

The Tubbaʿ and his people were idolaters. He set out for Mecca. On the way to Yemen, when he arrived between ʿUsfan and Amaj, he was met by a group from Hudhayl b. Mudrika b. Ilyas b. Mudar b. Nizar b. Maʿdd.

They said: “King, do you want us to show you an ancient treasury, which the kings before you ignored, in which is pearls, topaz, emeralds, gold and silver?”

He said: “Of course.”

They said: “It is a temple [bayt] in Mecca in which its people worship and pray.”

The real intention of the Hudhaylis, however, was to cause the king’s destruction, for they knew that any king who treated it with disrespect was sure to die.

Having agreed to the proposal he first sent for the two rabbis [whom he had met earlier in Medina] and asked their opinion. They told him that the sole object of the Hudhaylis was to destroy him and his army: “We know of no other temple in the land which God has chosen for himself,” they said, “and if you do what they suggest then you and all your men will be destroyed.”

The king asked them what he should do when he got there. They told him to do what the people of Mecca did: Circumambulate the temple, venerate and honor it, shave his head, and behave with all humility until he had left its precincts.

The king asked the rabbis why they too should not perform these rites and they replied that it was indeed the temple of their father Abraham but the idols which the local inhabitants had set up around it and the blood which they shed there kept them from coming. [They concluded by remarking that] the people there are unclean polytheists.

Recognizing the truth of their advice, the king summoned the men from the Hudhayl and cut off their hands and feet before continuing to Mecca. He went around the Kaʿba, sacrificed, shaved his head and stayed there for six days, sacrificing animals, which he distributed to the people, and giving them honey to drink.4

Subsequent to this incident, Ibn Ishaq reports that Tubbaʿ had a series of dreams instructing him to cover the temple with woven palm branches and then special fine cloths from Yemen. He is said to have ordered the local inhabitants to keep the temple clean, forbade blood and dead bodies from the area, and made a door with a lock and key for the Kaʿba.5 A pre-Islamic poem cited by Ibn Ishaq claims that Tubbaʿ made the pilgrimage barefoot, bringing with him two thousand Mehri camels, which he sacrificed and fed to the people there.6 Abu Hurayrah reports that the Prophet Muhammad said the Tubbaʿ king was the first person to put a cover (kiswa) on the Kaʿba, and Abu ʿArubah al-Harani relates that the first thing ever given to the Kaʿba was this covering.7

Arab historians record the giving of gifts to the Kaʿba and the sanctuary in Mecca by other pre-Islamic kings. In his collection of accounts of pre-Islamic history, Ahmad b. Abi Yaʿqub al-Yaʿqubi(d. 905) mentions that ʿAbd al-Muttalib, the paternal grandfather of the Prophet Muhammad, uncovered the treasury of the Kaʿba when he was digging for the well of Zamzam.8 According to Yaʿqubi and others, the treasure discovered by ʿAbd al-Muttalib included swords and other weapons, armor, and two golden gazelles. Ahmad Ibn Saʿd (ca. 784–845) reports, on the authority of Ibn ʿUmar, that ʿAbd al-Muttalib used the golden gazelles to make doors, a lock, and keys to protect the Kaʿba.9

In his wide-ranging hi...